Resolving Hyper-V Module 'Disk' Power On Failed Error in VMware

There comes a time when you
wake up to find, the virtual machine systems that took so long to build has
failed to start up. A perfectly normal emotional response will be going into panic mode about
the fate of your precious operating systems.

A sudden power cut for example
could render your virtual machine files corrupt and unable to fire up. This
particular error in question today pops up an error message “Failed to lock the
file, Cannot open the disk ‘C:\Users\Username\Documents\VirtualMachines\HyperV
Host Win Server 2016\HyperV Host Win Server 2016.vmdk’ or one of the snapshot disks it depends on, Module ‘Disk’ power on failed. Failed to start the virtual
machine”.

In a production environment where
multiple users could be logged into these virtual machines, it is advisable to
install a UPS to ensure your guest operating systems shutdown properly in the
event of a sudden power cut. Below, we shall explore how to resolve this
problem and recover our virtual machines.

Running virtual machines gives
us a great advantage to copy or move the configuration files to another host machine or
boot the machine up from a previous working state.

Navigate to the folder where
your VM files are located and notice there will be 3 files in your folder with
file extensions .LCK depicted below.
All you need to do at this stage is Delete those files and reboot your host
machine.

Once the host is back-up and
running, launch VMware workstation and fire up your virtual machines. If the
operation was successful, you will see your operating systems boot up as usual.

You may want to carry out some
maintenance on the guest OS any Hyper-V virtual
machines you may have installed to clean up the disk and clear up crash error
dump files.

A good industry practice is to
take periodic snapshots of your virtual machines to help you recover from
disasters. To perform this task in Hyper-V, follow these steps;

2.
Wait
for a few minutes while Windows creates the checkpoint which is also referred
to as Snapshot in Windows Server 2012R2. Checkpoint options can also be
configured under virtual machine settings.

You will see the date and time
of the newly created checkpoint in your dashboard to confirm the operation has
been successful.

Final
Thoughts

We hope
this article helps to recover your crashed Hyper-V VMs. Bear in mind, this
process may not work for bare metal VMware installations which may require
further editing of .vmdk files in
notepad to recover your operating systems. This example will work for lab
environments built on VMware Workstation with Windows Server 2016 and virtual
machines nested.

Do leave
your comments below about other ways to accomplish this task and we’d like to
thank you for investing your time with us.